Welcome Back

With Yuletide bloat deflating fast
In cheery gusts of fragrance passed,
These are the days, as is well known,
When winds of change are loudly blown.

Though noisily the festive shout
May blast the feeble Old Year out,
With Father Time you cannot win:
A tougher year just breezes in.

Samuel Grimsnipe

Limited Loyalties

Newly declassified papers in the Irish Republic include a note to taoiseach Charles Haughey from the Ulster Volunteer Force, claiming that British intelligence had given them his address and invited them to pay a call. As "loyalist paramilitaries" (pro-Imperial terrorists, in Oldspeak), the UVF were supposedly disinclined to do London's dirty work, having as usual misconstrued the relationship between the exalted state of Britishness and the humbler caste of colonial flunkeydom. This was in the mid-eighties, when the Barclaygraph and possibly even the Rothermere Daily Stürmer still had some pretensions to journalism; which accounts for the apparent fact that the call for assassination was delivered via MI5 rather than in a squealing 72-point screed on the front pages of the national lynch mob.

Triumph of the Null

Although the Government has lost great chunks of British colonial history from its archives, and has considerately withheld some of the later bits in case they prove embarrassing to the ghastly Euro-wogs, it has just about managed to preserve an item about the interregnum between the demise of Thatcher and the rise of Blair. A tedious little man had an uninspired turn at the Commonwealth's most interminable game, and afterwards dutifully copied a thank-you note from a 1950s guidebook: "With the jacaranda in full bloom, it is one of the finest cricket venues in the world." Everyone to whom Robert Mugabe spoke about the business was impressed; and now this thrilling chapter in our island story can be told to the public without unduly jeopardising Britain's national security. It is to be hoped that historians will be able to contain themselves, and not all wake up at once.

Scrooge McGoldrick

Yet another faceless and unelected bureaucrat has been making unhelpful remarks about the head-chopping House of Saud's crusade for British values in Yemen. Quite aside from putting medical personnel firmly in their place and further illustrating the necessity for firm border controls in a world made stable by wog-bombing, to say nothing of the impact on property values, the Saudi-led rampage is being conducted at least in part by British-trained and British-equipped troops. Hence, the crusade is by definition more restrained than anything the beastly Russians have managed by withdrawing from Syria, and certainly more humane than the notorious stone-throwers of Palestine. Nevertheless, the UN's humanitarian co-ordinator in Yemen, whose very job title comprises two of the least-approved functions in British political economy, seems to think there are grounds for pessimism. Well, he would, wouldn't he.

Still Lagging Behind Us

As fuel poverty strikes down the shirkers, and as Britain's patriotic press goes into its annual panic about cold weather in winter, the pathetic losers of two world wars and one World Cup have been paying the price for their underinvestment in shale-fracking and blanched radioactive pachyderms. An excess of politically correct energy means that supply has on several occasions exceeded demand, so that consumers have been forced to suffer the indignity of being paid to use electricity. Doubtless thanks to the opacity of the Brussels-Strasbourg axis, it remains as yet unclear how much damage these payouts have done to the former British-occupied territory, whose chancellor's notoriously migrant-friendliness and other Trotskyite tendencies helped force the mainland's Conservative MEPs into its present coalition with the Jew-baiters, climate change deniers and fans of the Latvian Waffen-SS.

One

The author of One, a dystopian novel published in 1953, was David Karp, later a noted TV screenwriter. Besides episodes for various long-running series, Karp wrote a fine TV film called The Brotherhood of the Bell, about a fraternity member who balks at his orders to betray a friend and finds his life being systematically taken apart.

The dystopian state in One is superficially benign, with no overt means of state terror; although, like the America where the book appeared, it does not shrink from using psychological torture and hypocritically disguised violence (such as arranged embolisms) upon those who step out of line. The state church typifies the general atmosphere: without formal doctrine or clergy, and with congregations who meet and testify Quaker-fashion, its adherents seem to be mainly neurotic housewives and toadying mediocrities whose ostentatious modesty extends to using their surnames instead of the word I.

At the time of its publication, One drew facile comparisons with Darkness at Noon, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, but it lacks their rigour in working out its ideas and Karp's style has slipshod moments which would never have escaped intact from Koestler, Orwell or Huxley. In its treatment of the relationship between the rebel and the inquisitor, One is perhaps a distant relative of Chesterton's Napoleon of Notting Hill, in which the representatives of order and freedom are shown to be reflections of one another.

Like the protagonist in The Brotherhood of the Bell, the rebel in One is a college professor; and like Rubashov in Darkness at Noon, Burden is a willing functionary of his eventual oppressors. He is a happy and self-complacent police spy, first seen using his lip-reading ability to eavesdrop at a distance in the college refectory. Unlike the protagonists in any of the three classic dystopias mentioned above, Burden's rebellion is entirely unintentional and unconscious; and the state only finds him out because his name happens to come up in a random sample for testing. Because Burden's case is purely subconscious - "a totally integrated heretic" - the Commissioner is all for simply hustling him off to execution; but the Commissioner's best inquisitor persuades him that for the sake of future generations an experiment in psychological reclamation should be made, and Burden is only too willing to co-operate.

The inquisitor, Lark, is characterised just as fully as Burden himself, and arguably more sympathetically; and this is both the book's greatest interest and its greatest frustration. As in Thomas M Disch's "Thesis on Social Forms and Social Controls in the USA", the state is imaginative enough to recruit heretics in its own service, and Lark himself is a testament to its success; but the story never explores either Lark's former rebellion or the possibility that Burden's present rebellion might be similarly put to work. Perhaps Burden is simply too mediocre to be useful (his rebellion never once extends beyond a largely unconscious and wholly unjustified sense of superiority); but if Karp had only found a way to extend Lark's experiment beyond the Commissioner's stipulated fortnight, One might well have deserved comparison with the classic English-language dystopias of the last century.

Brimstone

Martin Koolhoven 2016

A magnificently grim revenge Western, Brimstone gains rather more than suspense from its organisation into four non-chronological chapters. The first three are called Revelation, Exodus and Genesis, in that order; the last, which wraps up and concludes the foregoing, is Retribution. The film's mute protagonist, its snowbound final act and bleak payoff recall Sergio Corbucci's outstanding The Great Silence, but the lack of Tarantinesque winking and gurning is one of Brimstone's few mercies.

In the community where a mute midwife has made a happy marriage, a self-styled hunting-dog of the Divinity turns up and systematically tears the woman's life to pieces. His reasons for doing so become clear in the next two chapters, which inventively skew traditional Western tropes. Prostitution is as hard and messy as mining, but for some reason workers in the former profession lack the rights and privileges accruing to those in the latter; while set-piece duels in the street are as rigged against the honourable as Creation itself. The heroine's involvement with the preacher is a tale of child abuse, psychological and physical torture, wife-beating, witch-hunting, and worse; all of which, as the screenplay makes clear, are thoroughly Christian pastimes blessed with unequivocal Scriptural sanction.

As the black-coated Bible-dog, Guy Pearce ranges impressively between dour sanctimony, inquisitorial viciousness and hysterical zeal. Whether he is at any point actually supernatural is a question the film leaves open: the miscarriage which begins the midwife's tribulations might be the result of his laying-on of hands, or it might be a natural misfortune of which he takes canny advantage. There are equally fine performances by those playing the heroine: Emilia Jones and (redeeming any number of soulful-infant roles) Dakota Fanning, who spends most of her screen time without a voice.

The preacher's own final words demonstrate his thorough understanding of the nature of Hell; and although the heroine finally escapes the hound's pursuit, Hell's originator exacts retribution by sending some virtuous vultures at the end. There is one way out, but a hard one, and an unforgivable offence to the Author of all the world's suffering. Any sense of the heroine's triumph is undercut by the sunlit, self-centred musings of her daughter, a cheery breeder of more souls to perpetuate the misery: Hell on earth, resurrected from generation unto generation.

Operation Managed Hopelessness

The army has been roundly rebuked for considering an update to its brand advertising. Crossed swords, a crown and a lion were found to constitute too non-inclusive a symbol, and it was suggested that the logo be replaced by a union jack, which would exclude only the lesser breeds. Also, the slogan "Be the best" was considered off-putting, which seems reasonable enough given the present march to the nadir in almost every aspect of public life. In a country headed by the Battenbergs of Benefits Palace, administered by the Conservative Party, moralised by the Church of England and run by a gang of tax-dodging troglodytes, displays of actual merit are at best indiscreet. Nevertheless, the chair of the defence select committee assured the Rothermere Stürmer on Sunday that being the best was nothing to be ashamed of; although it is unclear whether he or the newspaper bothered to distinguish between mere achievement and (to pick a random triumph of military training) David Davis. At the moment, the Ministry for Wog-Bombing is at war with the Treasury over the empty suit's air-miles, and is run by a jumped-up school prefect whose idea of a sound defence policy is to recommend the extra-judicial killing of British citizens; so it would be understandable if the question was not explored too deeply.

Me at Poetry24:
Holy Office

Idle Foreign Beasts

Six months after the Grenfell Tower disaster, something rather similar has occurred at London Zoo: a fire broke out last night and apparently caused the death of several creatures which the Conservative Party regards as foreigners and animals. In this case, most civilised people also believe that the casualties were animals, so the dead-eyed warden of HM Zoo UK may not feel obliged to favour the survivors with a photo-opportunity involving herself and none of them; unless of course her little pet Gavin informs her that concern for animals is considered not only human, but British as well. At the moment, as at the corresponding point in the Grenfell Tower disaster, the precise casualty figures remain unclear; as do the cause of the fire and the chances of survivors being deported or sent to the slaughterhouse within three weeks.

Naval Glazing

National pride will receive a substantial boost after October 2019 with the return of the navy blue passport, which had been temporarily subverted by a document in a Euro-frog shade of maroon, thereby ceding the Freedom of the Seas to faceless bureaucrats in Brussels through an act of treason by various enemies of the people and citizens of nowhere. It was this mutinous conspiracy, rather than any loss of filthy lucre by the proles, or any gain of homeless children (who are not, after all, cluttering up our streets), or any gleeful kicking to bits of the National Health Service and the social security safety net, or any treating of immigrants as second-class citizens and of refugees as criminals, which diminished our national standing and which even now causes lesser breeds to snigger and shake their heads at the statesmanship of David Davis, Liam Fox and Boris Johnson. "Our British identity was slowly but surely being submerged into an artificial European one that most Brits felt increasingly unhappy about," blathered one expenses clamant last spring. There is, of course, nothing remotely artificial about Britishness, a concept which sprang up whole and entire at some point during the Neolithic, and will endure unaltered and adamantine unto the Day of Judgement, despite being fragile enough to be subverted by the act of changing a document's skin colour.

Smile Until You Drop

Representatives of British medical staff, who still seem to think they know more about public heath than Jeremy C Hunt or even Michael Gove, have been doing the pessimism thing over the Brexit faction's plans for another bonfire of regulations as soon as the Recrudescent Imperium has formalised its independence. The jabbering homunculus is reported to be campaigning to remove the evil foreign provisions of the Working Time Directive, and the dead-eyed warden has already pledged that workers' rights will be not merely protected but enhanced. Since there was no general election in 2017, and workers are already wielding power in company boardrooms, and the victims of Grenfell Tower have all been rehoused, it is to be hoped that the mere experts will finally learn to repent of their mutinous ways, and stop talking down the dedicated, optimistic, entrepreneurial, profitable, co-operative, non-immigrant human resources of Britain's health industry.

Another Grand Alliance

With her usual exquisite sense of comic timing, the dead-eyed warden of HM Prison UK is to visit Poland just as the ghastly Euro-wogs are plotting to censure the country's brave little government. The ruling Law and Justice party is a member of a gay-bashing, climate-denying bloc in the Euro-wog parliament, which has previously attracted the Jew-baiting Michał Kamiński, some fans of the Latvian Waffen-SS and a smarmy little chancer named David Cameron. The late Head Boy allied the British Conservative MEPs with the far-right rabble in one of his various appeasements of the Farage Falange; and the invertebrate authoritarian and self-appointed Trumpster groupie Tumbledown Tessie is not one to desert her allies just because they happen to be obnoxious fruitcakes. Law and Justice are in trouble with the ghastly Euro-wogs for taking protective measures against the judiciary becoming enemies of the people; but as long as the ghastly Euro-wogs continue in their failure to recognise the intellectual and moral supremacy of David Davis, any show of solidarity could result in hard words from Brussels and squeals about punishment beatings from the Dunkirk veterans at home. Fortunately, Tumbledown Tessie's previous acts of statesmanship in this area include having dinner in Sweden and deploying a hundred and fifty of the British Light Dragoons on the Polish-Russian border in case the year should happen to be 1795.

The Right Thing to Do

As with putting workers in boardrooms and rehousing the victims of Grenfell Tower, the dead-eyed warden's pledges on dealing with modern slavery have proven a bit Liberal Democrat. Since the victims of modern slavery tend not to be landlords, tax-dodgers or media moguls called Rupert, the Home Office has no interest in what is being spent on protecting them or in what effect the spending has, does not care whether services meet quality standards, and is about as concerned over safe houses as one might expect. This all works reasonably well as a deterrent to victims, who might otherwise come forward seeking help when imprisonment and deportation might offend; but the National Audit Office has very tactlessly chosen to release its report at one of those points in the news cycle when Tumbledown Tessie is trying to convince someone - anyone - that her pious proclamations might occasionally be worth the oxygen and muscle force required to snarl them out. Hence, the main conclusion which the Government is likely to draw from the NAO's report is the clear moral and ethical imperative to privatise the National Audit Office.

Fog of War

An anonymous source has assured us that the dead-eyed warden and her goons (or, in the Newspeak of peaceful and mutually beneficial trade agreements between the Recrudescent Imperium and the lesser breeds, her war cabinet) have met, a mere eighteen months after the referendum, either with or without the benefit of economic impact assessments depending on whether the posturing prima donna David Davis is a liar or a cretin, in order to thrash out the issues of what exactly they will be negotiating for and what will be left at the end. Some favour continuing closeness to the ghastly Euro-wogs, while others favour striking out on our own and relying on the international reputation for solidity and trustworthiness which the Johnson-Davis-Werritty axis has brought us. The dead-eyed warden herself is in favour of aiming higher than what is possible; while several key figures are largely united in still believing that the ghastly Euro-wogs need only hear our demands before caving in from sheer astonishment at our entrepreneurial audacity, and offering the long-awaited unconditional surrender.

Monkey Business

Doubtless owing to the renewed depths of moral laxity resulting from a few tentative and scattered recognitions of gays and transsexuals as human beings, creatures essentially resembling conservatives have been caught in flagrante with various members of other species. Japanese macaques of both sexes have been observed playing reindeer games with sika deer, apparently with the consent of the non-primate parties. It remains as yet unclear whether these transactions are a passing phenomenon, like the mating between the yapping bulldogs of UKIP and the blathering baboons in the House of Expenses Claimants which brought about the modern Conservative Party; or the start of a more venerable tradition, such as the half-century's organised breeding of vegetables with tapeworm which has produced the majority of our politico-journalistic class.

Conditional Release

From exile long and lonely, welcome back,
Beloved of the Senate, People, City!
Subversive not at all - charmingly witty
And certainly no pornographic hack.
In decadent decline, we sadly lack
Such artists as yourself; it's such a pity,
But now you're here, we'll push your every ditty
On Kindle and in tie-in paperback.

Now pedants' pap, force-fed to students bored,
Your tongue's inflections centuries unsaid,
Dear poets note: your nation welcomes you,
Your honour and your laurels all restored,
Provided you are studied more than read
And safe deceased a thousand years or two.

Carmen Sero

Cathedral of Co-operation or Barmy Army

Now that Britain is no longer available to provide a non-ideological counterweight to the integrationist juggernaut that is Brusso-Strasbourgian neo-Prussianism, the ghastly Euro-wogs are plotting to integrate their military powers. This was initially considered a rather rah-rah thing on the mainland, but problems arose when it became apparent that integrating with Europe might reduce our sycophantic dependence on the United States. Now the United States has decided that a hydrophobic head-tribble and its orange rubber dangler fight best alone, the Recrudescent Imperium may condescend to tag along after all; though doubtless we shall hear a good deal about British regiments no longer being by appointment to the monarch, and about the Luftwaffe pinching all the RAF's best planes, and about the French being lukewarm about the right kind of wog-bombing, and so forth. The Imperial Haystack had a bit of a burble about flying buttresses, which mercifully he has been informed are an architectural feature and not part of Bomber Command; although he still seems to think they are not an integral part of the architecture, but just leap gloriously and entrepreneurially in wherever they are needed. Fiends that they are, the Euro-wogs seem to have nodded politely and got back to work. Clearly, they have much to learn.

Truer Than Cenotaphs

What apter monument could be
Than chopping some memorial tree?
Done up in camo green and brown
It staunchly stands, till taken down
Because its presence isn't worth
The price of keeping in the earth.
It causes no expensive mess
With post-traumatic homelessness;
And, as with those whose carven name
Gives crutch to politicians' fame,
The sacrifice goes not to waste;
For trees can always be replaced.

Stumpy Oakshott

309-305

309
Clothed as that fine old democrat,
The tubby tyrant Tudor,
O fie! she soon discovered that
Her Empire's all the nuder.

305
So patriotic is their nature,
They don't incline to mutiny;
So nearly half the legislature
Does not believe in scrutiny.

Septimus Dolorosus

Audemus Jura Nostra Defendere

Interfering do-gooders from the United Nations, who seem to make a career out of annoying people trying to make their countries great again, have found conditions in the Christian state of Alabama particularly uplifting. A mere twenty miles from the state capital, the benefits of avoiding Big Government are apparent in the entrepreneurial get-up-and-go of residents enjoying the right to make their own sewage disposal arrangements. As a result they have hookworm, which indicates the kind of shirker incentivisation that the dead-eyed warden of HM Prison UK, despite all the glamour of her special relationship as the Trumpster's first sycophant, can still only dream of bestowing.

Ditch the Architectural Crap

In a concerted effort to prove themselves as sentient and feeling as any ordinary, decent average £50,000-a-year Briton, the Conservatives have been marshalling their expenses claimants on social media. Their eyes have been opened by a presentation from special advisers, whose shiny new editions of Corporate Humanspeak for Dummies evidently advise the use of homely metaphor now that obscurantism is out and plain old lying is in. Not only are we to understand that the Conservatives have a strategy beyond the usual Murdoch-directed linguo-rectal orientation and rinse; but the strategy is to be visualised as "a house where the roof is Brexit and the economy, but the three key pillars underneath are schools, housing and the environment". Aside from the Stalinist council-hovel nature of the building - only three pillars, indeed! - it's fortunate that the Government had the foresight to get rid of all those nasty experts; otherwise someone might have been unkind enough to tell the spadlings that it's inadvisable to build a house from the roof down, especially when the contractors happen to be cowboys like Davis, Hammond and Werritty.

Brits Don't Quit

In a report which will shock only those whose minds have been affected by family values, the charity Women's Aid has noted that most women who are murdered by men die at the hands of their intimates, rather than, as the present religious orthodoxy demands, at the hands of Muslims, ethnics, refugees or others supposedly not from around here. Two-thirds of those killed were killed by a current or former partner, and over eighty per cent were killed in their own home. Naturally, the Government is removing funding for refuges, presumably in the interests of defying the lesbian feminazis, keeping families together and empowering the British people to take back control and work things out for themselves. After all, if a deserving woman suffers a misunderstanding with the head of her household, she can always leave any infantine resources with the nanny and live at a proper hotel until it's all sorted out.

Non-Extreme Ultimate Values

Inaugurating the annual ding-dong-merrily-on-Winterval of Christian self-pity, the downtrodden and repressed occupier of a free seat in the House of Lords has blamed the individualistic materialism of secular schools for failing to indoctrinate potential junior Anglicans with appropriate British values. A chronic failure to push moral absolutes laid down by a supernatural being might even be helping to fuel the rise of extremism, according to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has previously expressed bewilderment over the number of church-goers who are fans of the Trumpster. Rather than mere utilitarianism, which decrees that terrorism should be fought because the persistence of terrorism is to our disadvantage, the Archbishop would prefer a less functional approach, whereby terrorism would be fought because the persistence of terrorism is unprofitable to the Church of England. Reports of the salutary effect of the Archbishop's speech on ISIS and Britain First are, at the time of writing, yet to start flooding in.

In the Beginning was the Correction to our Earlier Report

A mere few centuries after burning people who re-translated the Bible, the Catholic Church is beginning to get an inkling that all is not infallible about some of the texts we have. The Gospels as they stand are translated from various unreliable Greek translations of the rumoured Aramaic rantings of a fundamentalist yokel from Galilee; so one or two errors in transmission might be excusable from any god whose omnipotence is less advertised than Jehovah's. The Pope is concerned about the interpretation of the translation of the translation of a single line of the Lord's Prayer, which specifies that He who created the world, the flesh and the devil is morally answerable for their frailties. The original is lost, and the Greek means something rather different; but "Lead us not into temptation" is unfair to the sky-daddy, since it implies that He who made the human race and allowed Satan to tempt the faithful bears some sort of responsibility for the consequences, and if there is one thing Omnipotence cannot stand, it is being unfairly saddled with responsibilities. The Pope would prefer the line to read "do not let us fall into temptation", suggesting that the Father's conduct towards His children can be explained by neglect rather than deliberate malice, and that He had intended all along to speak in French.

Economic Health

We're still clearing up Labour's mess,
A bit sluggish, let me confess:
Still burdened with shoals
Of unemployed proles
Despite there being none, more or less.

But if productivity's limp
Be British and don't be a wimp:
Keep calm and don't chide,
And swallow your pride
And think about sacking that gimp!

Anonymous

Oh, the Humanity

Most people with a mental age of ten or under believe that turning on the waterworks will get you out of trouble; doubtless the only reason the blithering prima donna David Davis hasn't tried it yet is that he holds to a more old-fashioned, page-three-girl-posing, Diane-Abbott-grabbing idea of what it means to be a Man. The Conservative MP Heidi Allen has no such inhibitions, having apparently brought a handy onion to the debate on her party's latest round of poor-bashing; and she was shamelessly egged on by the chair of the workfare and privation committee, Frank Field, whose concern for lives blighted by poverty evidently does not extend to twisting rhetorical knives in an opportunistically leaking blighter. The whole posturing pantomime has been reported with slightly more than due reverence, both for the underlying message (viz. that parliamentary expenses claimants deserve your sympathy at least as much as any suicidal scrounger) and for Allen's Duncan Smith homily on, by God, working together and kicking the poor better still.

Even Our Homes Are Foreign Now

More than a sixth of people working on building sites for houses are Euro-wogs, and the figure rises to fifty per cent in London, according to a survey by the Home Builders Federation. Contractors will need continued access to Euro-wog labourers if the Government's housing target is to be reached; so it seems, on the whole, rather fortunate that the Government does not particularly care about reaching its housing target. Most of the Euro-wogs apparently plan to stay despite the hostile environment; possibly some hope to better themselves by applying to the Home Office, where they are much more likely to be genuinely valued and appreciated; at least until those hospitable G4S people come for them, too.

When Irish Noes are Twitching

Well, here's a thing: the DUP are not like the Liberal Democrats. Having allied herself with the creationist gay-bashers, apparently under the impression that anyone from so untroubled a province of the Empire could hardly help but be reasonable, Tumbledown Tessie toddled off to give the Euro-wogs what-for, only for her allies to chop her off at the knees in front of all the grown-ups and David Davis. The deal, which might have been expected to last at least until more than one person tried to interpret the wording, did not even survive through lunchtime. By contrast to the junior partners in Britain's previous hard-right coalition, the Democratic Unionists are in earnest about at least one word in their party's name - an attitude which must come as quite a shock to the Conservatives, whose name tends to suggest such outmoded political virtues as strength, stability and economic competence.

The Heartless and the Brainless

Although eighty per cent of Britons say they support organ donation, more than half of British families are against organ donation. Presumably the logic is much the same as operated among Britain's majority of non-xenophobes who voted to let the Euro-wogs fend for themselves: although almost all Britons are in favour of tolerance and economic prosperity, more than half who expressed a preference voted for patriotic rah-rah and economic suicide. For the intellectual élite among these not-a-racist-buts, the realisation is slowly dawning that leaving the EU may somehow be vaguely connected with a loss of EU funding and investment; it remains to be seen how many of Britain's hard-working families will be able to join the dots between the lengthening queues for organ transplants and the kind of loved one who prefers dead meat to the prospect of helping a stranger who might not, after all, deserve it.

There's Always That One Restaurant You Never Got to Trash

Given all the problems he managed to cause, it is certainly charitable of Britain's late Head Boy to regret mainly the fact that he failed to provide a sufficiently attractive market for insurance companies to profit from the elderly. With the merry connivance of their little orange faglings, the Head Boy and his chubby little chumlies of the Bullingdon Club passed the Health and Social Care Act, effectively wrecking health and social care; now, having reaped the financial rewards from his six-year spree of poor-bashing and cripple-kicking, the Head Boy has had a bit of a burble about where it all went wrong. The answer, as always, is doubtless that his government failed to create a sufficiently hostile environment for the young, the unemployed, the sick, the poor, the wogs and the hated public sector. For his own part, the Head Boy saw in his constituents the catastrophic cost of care for the elderly, and was so concerned about it that he decided representing them was far less important than putting up a new garden shed.

Boosting the Green Crap

Although the British Conservative Party generally takes a liberal attitude to unfair dismissal, it seems there are limits. The blithering prima donna in charge of Brexit has given forth an aria upon the wonders of doing right by working people, provided the people happen to be chums of the blithering prima donna in charge of Brexit. The lily-white innocent in this case is the dead-eyed warden's consiglierrore Damian Green, whose straightforward shop-floor virtues apparently include office-party gropery and a can-do attitude to lever-pulling. As a member of the most persecuted minority in the world (wealthy white right-wing male nasties, for those who came in late), Green is apparently the victim of a vendetta by those ghastly, non-G4S police persons, and the blithering prima donna has accordingly readied the nuclear deterrent and is presumably hoping it can manage not to hit Miami. Should Green be dismissed in a manner unsatisfactory to the blithering prima donna, the latter has threatened to leave the Government and thereby risk the Brexit process coming to some sort of order.